"I started making websites back in 1998 when I was still a student teacher. During a summer break from my 'teacher training' university course, I decided to try making a website and, over 10 years later, that site is still running. After discovering my new 'hobby' and because I enjoyed it so much, I was really keen to build a website as part of my work in school. I set up some basic sites for a couple of schools while I was on teaching practice there, but I didn't ever have the time to develop a school website on a long term basis.

So, when I started working full-time at my first school I offered to build a new school site for them, as the existing site was just a single page with one photo on it. My two main aims for the site were:

1. To provide useful information for current and prospective parents, as well as others who had an interest in the school.
2. To showcase the work and achievements of the children.

This second reason was, and still is, extremely important to me. I see school web sites as a place to show off the amazing things that children do in school. Putting work up on our classroom displays is great, but the audience for that work is limited to the children and staff, as well as parents when they are able to come into the classroom. Adding children's work to the school website has a number of powerful benefits:

• It is an incredible motivating factor for the children. Simply by saying 'we can put your work on the school website...' during a lesson, their enthusiasm for the task always increases considerably.
• This also encourages them to check their work carefully, and improve it where possible, as they are publishing their work to a potential audience of thousands (or even more).
• Children can also go home and show their friends and family what they've been doing at school. This is particularly useful for those family members who might not always be able to visit the lassroom to see the children's achievements.
• The people who do look at pupils' work online (whether family / friends or other visitors from around the world) are also able to send their feedback. Over the years, we have had countless positive emails from people in many different countries. The children's reaction when they receive feedback from someone (whether local to us, or living in another country) is always fantastic

We have also had lots of incredible experiences that have arisen as a result of using the site to 'show off' what our children achieve at school. The work on our school site has led to our children appearing on local radio on numerous occasions, an appearance on national TV, and even a trip to London to receive a BECTA gave me both flexibility and control over the design and the content of the site. However, it had a number of problems. Firstly, I could only edit the site in one place... on my home computer. This meant that I could only ever add new content when I was at home, which therefore took up quite a bit of my free time. This situation also made it impossible for others to add content to the site. Staff would have to give me copies of work which I would then take home and put online.

As time passed the site was updated and received a number of design changes. However, although I have a keen interest in web design, my technical skills weren't able to improve as quickly as I would have liked.

• 
  2001 Design
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  2005 Design
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  2007 Design
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  2008 Design

So, over the years, we began using various third party tools to add extra functionality to the site. By this time last year, we were using:

• the HTML pages on our main site (hosted by our local education authority)
• a third party blogging platform (to post school news, to put children's work online quickly, and to give pupils experience of blogging)
• a free wiki provider (which was used as part of an ICT club)
• an online calendar (to share important dates with staff and parents)
• a gallery system (to show photos of our school, and of the children's achievements)

All of this usually worked well. However, it became increasingly difficult to manage. Different parts of the school site were hosted in different systems, which all had different usernames and passwords. We were becoming more and more reliant upon these third party services, some of which became increasingly unreliable. We were also a little disappointed when one of them began adding adverts into their pages, in amongst our pupils' work.

So, at the end of last year, we decided to investigate using a CMS to manage the site. I didn't want to set this up myself, as it would have involved regular technical jobs and upgrades. Therefore, I looked around at a number of companies who could provide us with a school website. This involved trying out demo accounts with each company's CMS, or speaking to a rep to discuss what they could offer. After comparing the features, price and service of a few companies, we decided to use e4education because:

• Their initial support was extremely good. They always answered emails / phone calls very quickly and were able to help with any questions that I had.
• The CMS that they provide is incredibly easy to use. Once logged in, there is a content editor which allows anyone to add new material quickly and easily. Although this is very simple and easy to use (which is perfect for pupils, and for members of staff who aren't particularly confident), it also has lots of advanced features. You can also edit the HTML of each page if required, allowing you to embed different types of media.
• They have a fantastic video conversion system, which saves me a great deal of time. Our school regularly makes stop motion animations and I used to spend lots of time converting videos to the correct format for use online. However, the video system within this CMS converts the video file to a 'flash' video automatically. It's fantastic!
• Their content management system also allows us to continue with our podcasting, video work and blogging incredibly easily, creating the RSS feeds automatically. Again, this saves me a huge amount of time, as I used to edit our previous podcast RSS feed manually.
• It's also possible to create additional user accounts so that other members of staff can add work themselves. I will be running staff training in the near future to help others become more active in creating the site, and I'm also hoping to get a group of older children involved too. They can be content creators, and their work will then be published once it has been approved by an adult.

Our school site has only been live for a few weeks at the time of writing this, but we're very happy so far. The designer used our ideas to create a new look for the site. He then listened to our feedback and requests for changes until we were happy with the result. Once this was completed, the site was built and we began adding content. e4education offered to add our content for us, but I decided to do this myself as it was a good opportunity for me to begin using the CMS. It didn't take long for the site to fill up, and I've been adding new material much more regularly than before... it's great fun!

Being able to update the site so quickly, and from any computer, is a huge improvement for me, as it really allows me to spend more time on adding new content to the site, and really helps us to show off our children's achievements as quickly as possible."

Mark Warner
The Downs Church of England Primary School

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